The Nature and Structure of MS-13 in Los Angeles County

2021 ◽  
pp. 073401682110299
Author(s):  
Lidia E. Nuño ◽  
Edward R. Maguire
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Criminal Behavior ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Los Angeles County ◽  
The United States ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
The Public ◽  
Latin American Immigrants ◽  
Key Aspects

Recent descriptions of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) by senior U.S. government officials suggest that the gang is highly organized, has significant transnational capacity, and is heavily involved in violence. Arguably, these depictions have created moral panic among the public and have fed xenophobic attitudes toward Latin American immigrants. However, little is known from empirical research about the nature and structure of MS-13 in the United States. In this article, we draw on data from interviews with incarcerated MS-13 members in Los Angeles County, the birthplace of MS-13. We examine three key aspects of MS-13: its organizational characteristics, its transnational capacity, and its involvement in criminal behavior, including violence. Our findings provide a useful descriptive summary of MS-13 in Los Angeles County, where the gang originated. Our findings also suggest that while there are good reasons to take MS-13 seriously as a threat to public safety, much of the public discourse on the gang is based on inaccurate assumptions.

Failure to alert? Exploring perceptions of ShakeAlert during the 2019 Ridgecrest Earthquake SequenceShow affiliations

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Mcbride ◽  
Robert de Groot ◽  
Tao Ruan ◽  
Qin Lv ◽  
Qingkai Kong
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Los Angeles County ◽  
Warning System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Earthquake Early Warning System ◽  
The Public ◽  
Perceived Performance ◽  
Experience Levels ◽  
The City

<p>On July 4, 2019, a M6.4 earthquake struck Ridgecrest, California. The next evening, on July 5, an even larger M7.1 rattled the region. The ShakeAlert Earthquake Early Warning System for the West Coast of the United States detected and issued ShakeAlert Messages for both earthquakes to pilot users of the system. Several ShakeAlert technical partners, including the Caltech UserDisplay demonstration console, also delivered alerts to their users. However, the Los Angeles City application (app), powered by ShakeAlert, developed and being tested by the City of Los Angeles did not deliver ShakeAlerts to approximately 700,000 test users in Los Angeles County. This is because the alerting threshold of the estimated shaking (above Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) IV, potentially damaging shaking) was not met for either event in Los Angeles County. While the minimum magnitude threshold of M5.0 for both earthquakes was met, the shaking estimated by the ShakeAlert system indicated that no part of Los Angeles County would experience levels of shaking that would be damaging. Although the ShakeAlert System performed as designed—in both the Ridgecrest area as well as in Los Angeles—various media outlets and initial feedback from LA City app users suggest that the public perceived that the system did not work.</p><p>This presentation offers an analysis of media and social media data related to the perceived performance of the ShakeAlert System during the Ridgecrest earthquake sequence. Specially, we focus on a comparison between media depictions and social media activity in the two geographic regions that did and did not receive a ShakeAlert message, Kern County and Los Angeles, respectively. This represents in many ways a natural experiment, and it is important to learn from these early perceptions of this emergent system.</p>

Research Opportunities in Modern Latin America: I. Mexico and Central America

1962 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 352-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Naylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Modern Latin America

If by opportunity we mean “a favorable juncture of circumstances” then the picture which emerges is not exactly propitious. The Latin American Conference held this year in Los Angeles reflected the concern about the post World War II decline of interest in Latin America and the prevailing indifference of students, the public, and many academic institutions toward Latin America, past and present. Contributing to this general apathy were both the general cultural orientation of the United States and Latin America toward Europe, and the general shift of American emphasis after 1945 to “crisis areas” which reduced Latin America to a minor position since it appeared to be neither threatened nor threatening in the polarized world. (In this respect, Castro remains our greatest benefactor.) Furthermore, the more obvious availability of funds, both public and private, for studies of these “crisis areas” tended to confirm the seeming unimportance of Latin America. The failure to attract the needed personnel, recognition, and support, coupled with the dissipation of current resources for the study of Latin America in the United States have, with few exceptions, prevented Latin American programs from developing momentum and visibility.

scholarly journals Planning for the Control of Pandemic Influenza A (H1N1) in Los Angeles County and the United States

2011 ◽  
Vol 173 (10) ◽  
pp. 1121-1130 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. L. Chao ◽  
L. Matrajt ◽  
N. E. Basta ◽  
J. D. Sugimoto ◽  
B. Dean ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Pandemic Influenza ◽  
Influenza A ◽  
Los Angeles County ◽  
The United States ◽  
Influenza A H1n1

Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism

1991 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-23
Author(s):  
Roger Rouse
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Social Space ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mexican Migration ◽  
Single Word ◽  
The Social ◽  
Made In

In a hidden sweatshop in downtown Los Angeles, Asian and Latino migrants produce automobile parts for a factory in Detroit. As the parts leave the production line, they are stamped “Made in Brazil.” In a small village in the heart of Mexico, a young woman at her father’s wake wears a black T-shirt sent to her by a brother in the United States. The shirt bears a legend that some of the mourners understand but she does not. It reads, “Let’s Have Fun Tonight!” And on the Tijuana-San Diego border, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a writer originally from Mexico City, reflects on the time he has spent in what he calls “the gap between two worlds”: “Today, eight years after my departure, when they ask me for my nationality or ethnic identity, I cannot answer with a single word, for my ‘identity’ now possesses multiple repertoires: I am Mexican but I am also Chicano and Latin American. On the border they call me ‘chilango’ or ‘mexiquillo’; in the capital, ‘pocho’ or ‘norteno,’ and in Spain ‘sudaca.’… My companion Emily is Anglo-Italian but she speaks Spanish with an Argentinian accent. Together we wander through the ruined Babel that is our American postmodemity.”

Prosperity Gospel Latinos and Their American Dream

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Tian-Ren Lin
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
American Dream ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
Religious Experiences ◽  
Prosperity Gospel ◽  
White American ◽  
Material Goods ◽  
Latin American Immigrants ◽  
Insight Into

In this immersive ethnography, Tony Tian-Ren Lin explores the reasons that Latin American immigrants across the United States are increasingly drawn to Prosperity Gospel Pentecostalism, a strand of Protestantism gaining popularity around the world. Lin contends that Latinos embrace Prosperity Gospel, which teaches that believers may achieve both divine salvation and worldly success, because it helps them account for the contradictions of their lives as immigrants. Weaving together his informants’ firsthand accounts of their religious experiences and everyday lives, Lin offers poignant insight into how they see their faith transforming them both as individuals and as communities. The theology fuses salvation with material goods so that as these immigrants pursue spiritual rewards they are also, perhaps paradoxically, striving for the American dream. But after all, Lin observes, prosperity is the gospel of the American dream. In this way, while becoming better Prosperity Gospel Pentecostals they are also adopting traditional white American norms. Yet this is not a story of smooth assimilation as most of these immigrants must deal with the immensity of the broader cultural and political resistance to their actually becoming Americans. Rather, Prosperity Gospel Pentecostalism gives Latinos the logic and understanding of themselves as those who belong in this country yet remain perpetual outsiders.

Imperial routes, national networks and regional projects in the Pan-American Highway, 1884–1977

2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosa E. Ficek
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
The United States ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Pan American ◽  
National Networks ◽  
Planning And Construction ◽  
Regional Projects

This article discusses the planning and construction of the Pan-American Highway by focusing on interactions among engineers, government officials, manufacturers, auto enthusiasts, and road promoters from the United States and Latin America. It considers how the Pan-American Highway was made by projects to extend U.S. influence in Latin America but also by Latin American nationalist and regionalist projects that put forward alternative ideas about social and cultural difference—and cooperation—across the Americas. The transnational negotiations that shaped the Pan-American Highway show how roads, as they bring people and places into contact with each other, mobilize diverse actors and projects that can transform the geography and meaning of these technologies.

scholarly journals Latinas for Trump Analysis of Processes of Identification and the Use of Narratives to Construct Subject-Positions

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-214
Author(s):  
Mayela Zambrano
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
The United States ◽  
Apparent Contradiction ◽  
Negative Stereotypes ◽  
Political Preference ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Latino Community ◽  
The U.S

AbstractThe public and commercial spheres constantly address the largest ethnic minority in the United States, people with ancestry or from a Latin American country, as a homogenous group under the ethnopolitical terms “Latinos,” “Hispanics,” and even “Mexicans.” This panethnic view, and the negative stereotypes associated with it, was especially visible during the 2016 presidential election. While the majority of Latinos found Donald Trump’s remarks on “Mexicans” offensive to the Latin community as a whole, a large number of people still supported his opinions, even those belonging to the “Latino” community. Even more so, women of Latino heritage still supported a nominee that went against their own advance in society given his constant misogynistic comments. In this essay, I analyze the groundings for this apparent contradiction in the preference for said candidate. I argue that these women’s political preference is a tool with which they build their identity in the U.S. Besides, I explore the ways in which individuals linguistically construct their own identity in three ways (i) by actively doing the identification instead of merely receiving it by an unknown agent; (ii) by choosing the self-representation of their preference, and (iii) by finding commonalities and bonding with other individuals they deem part of their group. Through this approach, I analyze semiotic processes, such as intertextuality, use of pronouns, and discourse alignment, that are used to construct identifications of the self that go beyond imposed categories, such as gender and ethnicity.

scholarly journals Bella Abzug, queer rights, and disrupting the status quo

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Trevor G Gates ◽  
Margery C Saunders
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Working Environment ◽  
Field Analysis ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Status

Workers who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ)-identified have always been a part of the workplace in the United States, yet there has been a lack of awareness about how to advocate for the needs of these people. This lack of awareness was challenged by Congresswoman Bella Abzug. Abzug’s campaign for creating an equal working environment for sexual minorities initiated gradual changes in the public discourse concerning workplace and other broad equality measures for these communities. To frame these gradual transformations within a historical context, we use Lewin’s force field analysis framework to examine the change efforts of Abzug. Abzug had beginning success in thawing the status quo yet her visions for equality for LGBTQ people have yet to be realized. Using Abzug’s social action as an example, this article concludes that allies must continue to challenge societal oppression, power, and privilege and to demand civil rights protections for LGBTQ individuals.

scholarly journals Stress and Coping: Latino Youth Coming of Age in a New Latino Destination

2016 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 407-432 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Brietzke ◽  
Krista Perreira
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Latino Youth ◽  
The United States ◽  
Stress And Coping ◽  
Latino Adolescents ◽  
Latin American Immigrants ◽  
Community Environments ◽  
And Coping

Previous research has linked stress to adverse mental health outcomes among Latino adolescents living in the United States. The mechanism through which this process operates continues to be explored, especially in regions of the country where Latin American immigrants and their children have only recently begun to migrate. Our study aimed to contextualize the processes of stress and coping among Latino adolescents growing up in an emerging Latino destination in the United States—North Carolina. All adolescents in our study were either the first- or second-generation children of immigrants from Latin American countries, including Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico. We used a longitudinal qualitative design, conducting in-depth interviews with 12 parent-adolescent dyads during each adolescent’s first year of high school (2006-2007) and approximately 4 years later (2009-2010). We identified four stress-coping trajectories that varied on the following dimensions: primary sources of stress, buffers countering these stressors, coping approaches, and the effects of these processes on adolescents’ striving for socioeconomic mobility. Our findings underscore the interplay between family, school, and community environments within an emerging Latino destination.

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